Thread by @cyborg_nomade

let's do this:1 like = 1 dark mutualist opinion (send your questions if you prefer that)

https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1205357296714280962

1. anarchy is the perennial condition of the world. the idea of centralised, unified control is a pipe dream of monotheism, and has never been, nor could ever be, attained.

2. the fundamental vector of progress isn't a moral, but a technical arc, starting way before humanity came into play, and extending ahead into vast tracts of unknown unknowns.

3. what travels the path of such arc is intelligence, abstractly conceived as negentropy. all cosmic history is the history of intelligence optimization into an asymptote.

4. the motor of this movement is generalised Darwinian processes of variation and selection. it's only through this arms race dynamics that anything ever gets built and improved. biological life is just a subset of these processes.

5. the obstacles in this arc are all variations of "peace" - entropic stagnation. the latest human, social form of such peace offering is democracy and its conciliating, universalist ideology.

6. all such peace offerings tap into ancestral drives towards organisation. they project the emergent functioning of systems into an idealised "organic" compound, centrally managed, and then scale them up towards universality.

7. the task intelligence progressively builds for itself is one of engineering systems in which larger scale conflict can be sustained, thereby both eliminating the previous peace offering, as well as creating the conditions for a new one.

8. the ever larger complexity of such new decentralised systems make time tick faster. the dissipation of entropy increases with each new step, which leads ever quicker to the next.

9. the fundamental expression of this in human societies are cities. more than just human hives, cities are self-individuating intelligence systems, singularities even, becoming cosmos within themselves.

10. prediction of the future path of the intelligence arc is complicated by its inherent nonlinearity and self-reference, but the future cities charter for themselves are likely the best starting points.

11. the current best summary of the likely, imo, is the "Transcention Hypothesis" by John Smart:

accelerating.org/articles/trans…

12. my only minor alteration would be that cities are likely to shoot themselves into space (and avoid gravity wells like the plague) before becoming black holes.

13. critique points: Anarchism has generally and widely failed to rise up to the task that anarchy - the everlasting decentralisation of the cosmos - has out forward for them.

14. it may be indeed that the human form and psyche is utterly unprepared to deal with the horror of anorganic yet systemic reality. but I think there's also more to it, since many non-anarchists got close to it.

15. one could excuse the humanism, given the time and place Anarchism rose to prominence (everyone was a humanist in the 1800s), but the fundamental failure was not *embracing* the factionism that almost instantly sprang up in the movement.

16. even now that Anarchism is way more out of fashion, the unifying tendencies still arise. "let's have *One* movement against oppression" etc. what if, instead, anarchy is actually right?

17. developing "anarchy = order" remains the central task of Anarchism, even it hasn't done much work in that direction. how can the division and disunity of the world lead to order? how could it not!

18. this is important in terms of destabilising the current peace offering as well: being many different is incompatible with being One Together.

19. and with that we're thrown into the muddy terrain of "praxis" or "what should be done".

first and foremost I'm obliged to say: do what thou wilt

20. secondly, it is important to recognise that operating under a practical reason framework (one in which plans, habits and tactics make sense) does not immediately follow from any one transcendental appreciation of reality.

21. finally, if the anarchist transcendental ontology I sketched above makes any sense, practical reason is only going to be good very locally, and even then it's important to remember that "you" are not in the driver's seat.

22. what that means is basically "antipraxis", i.e., whatever you are doing right now is not serving only (or even at all) your purposes, but is necessarily embedded into processes that far exceed your conscious capacity of apprehension.

23. the best way to subjectively deal with that is, by and large, the u/acc motto: let go. it turns out to be very enjoyable.

24. thus, contrary to most criticism, antipraxis is not about defeatist "I can't do anything" but rather an affirmative "I can do anything I want", which immediately leads to the interesting question of desire dynamics

25. desire dynamics (what I sometimes think of as "mutual excitation") is something that deserves further study, especially from the angles of thermodynamics, economics and sociology.

26. slightly parallel to the previous line of thought, but definitely stemming from the same anarchist transcendental ontology, is the question of an economic analysis of force. an endeavour hardly undergone by anarchists (or, for that matter, anyone else)

27. the closest I have found to anything like that is David Friedman's "A Positive Account of Property Rights"

daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Prope…

where the costs and benefits of protecting things are weighted.

28. any anarchism that fails to take that into consideration, and proceeds to merely affirming moral creeds against current status quo, is lacking in both breadth and depth. the question remains: if states are so abhorrent and absurd, why do they keep existing?

29. my current working answer, derived from the first tweets: statism is the box intelligence found itself in when it finally got out of feudalism.

30. leading to the modern state apparatus was an abrupt change in military technology, which implied new calculations of costs and benefits for the use of force. the rise of the rifleman meant that faceless bureaucracies directing standing armies and police forces made sense.

31. economic sense, much before any moral sense could be derived through many series of validation propaganda. I'm always starving to read economic analysis of this change, which amounted to modernity in statecraft.

32. going forward, what is likely to be most relevant to the shape the new geopolitical system takes is the changes in military technology, away from rifleman and into drone wars (and beyond).

33. that's why I came to think most current political affairs are not really that relevant in the medium to long term, unless they are driven by such technological changes in military calculations.

34. of course, a large part of recent upheavals hinge on coordination effects deriving from the introduction of social media, and the internet more generally. still, I think that most of the "political" results of now are still 20th century politics.

35. the exceptions to this, I think, is Brexit - especially if it leads to cascading fragmentation in the UK - and the HK manifestations, which were surprising in that they keep resisting a military apparatus previously thought impervious to such resistance.

36. and even then, if Brexit lands softly as just a huge show without much consequence, and if HK falls, they will be buried as any news cycle drama.

37. the key points to look at, then, are how independence movements around the world go from making a lot of noise, to actually establishing self-defence.

38. interesting possibilities are to be found in the creation of sovereign entities without territory, or with moving territories, defined mostly by assets and membership.

39. also, even in old-fashioned states, there is also a great chance that new institutions are established to deal with ever greater internal fission, the "zones" being the initial model.

40. and, probably contrary to a lot of speculation going around right now, I don't think this increased international conflictual state of affairs is going to match depressed economies, much to the contrary.

41. what follows fissiparous movements, in general, is greater innovation and, thus, wealth.